Disclaimer: Some of what follows may be difficult to understand. I do not "write down" to you. You are old enough now to develop a deep understanding of the complex world around us. Please ask your parents to explain. And see if they agree with some strong opinions below. It will help you intellectually to consider a disagreement between your grandfather, your parents, others and think things through for yourself. Difference in opinion, especially in politics, is healthy. We don't cancel each other, but listen respectfully, calmly, thoughtfully.
As we face a new world, exploding in chaos, it will help to distinguish three paths forward for the USA: Isolationism (detachment), Liberal Cosmopolitanism (cooperation), and Neo-Conservatism (strong American global presence.) The Isos say "Let's stay to ourselves and keep away from all these foreigners!" The Cosmos say "Lets be nice and talk things over and we can all get along!" The Neocons say "Think twice about violating our people! You will regret it!"
Our New World
Let's contrast the new order emerging in the first two decades of the third millennium with the one that followed WWII (1945-2000). The one is the world you will live in; the other the one I have lived in. Often called "Pax Americana" or American Peace, the postwar era was structured by two facts: First, the Cold War, the bipolar contest between a globally dominant USA and an ambitious Soviet communist empire. Secondly, global poverty that was partially mitigated by an expansive, prosperous, , capitalist economy that lifted millions out of poverty. In 1989 the Soviet Empire collapsed and the whole world seemed to be moving into the American way: open markets, capitalism, human rights, rule of law, democracy, etc. A famous book declared "The End of History," claiming that Western Liberalism had prevailed over competing ideologies and that a free, prosperous future was now secure. It was a time of euphoria and confidence.
This new order was disrupted, at the very start of the new century/millennium, by a series of explosions: First, and most threatening, a capitalist-but-still-communist China with immense energies, resources and ambitions. Secondly, varieties of Jihadist terror, including the new state of Iran. Third, the threat of global warming. Fourth, extraordinary waves of displaced refugees flooding the West. Fifth, an aggressive, fascist Russia. Sixth, extraordinary technological developments that have changed our lives in social media, the internet (cyberbullying, cyberwarfare), reproductive engineering, gender changes and others. Seventh, within the West, a loss of unity and purpose in a Culture War of the secular elites against a complex populism that is at once religiously conservative, alienated and angry, suspicious of the liberal order and its institutions, and vulnerable to demagogic, xenophobic chauvinism.
In this new world, three paths present themselves in foreign relations. The three can be blended in actual practice, but in theory they contradict each other in their understanding of the world, our nation, and prudent policy.
Isolationism
This is the intention to pull back from an over-commitment overseas and direct our resources to our own country. It is expressed as: "We cannot be the world's policeman!" Or: "Why worry about Ukraine's border when we cannot protect our own?" Or: "Why so much foreign aid when our own citizens are suffering poverty?"
It is and has been stronger on the Right. It rejects the imperial role the USA has played since 1945. It is a return to the isolationism of the 1930s (Charles Lindberg, Joseph Kennedy) that resisted entry into the war until Pearl Harbor. It longs for the first 120 years of our nation when we were largely alone, removed from the conflicts of other continents.
In the 1960s, leftwing aversion to the Vietnam war, American "imperialism" and the "military-industrial complex" left much of my own boomer generation with tendencies to soft isolationism, pacifism, and liberal cosmopolitism. This new culture contrasted sharply with the generously international and virile patriotism that motivated our parents to liberate Europe and the Pacific.
Millennials (born 1980-2000), coming of age during the long, costly and seemingly futile Iraq and Afghanistan wars, have an isolationist tendency. They see the dark side of the "American Empire," the loss of American lives, the extravagant cost, the post-trauma suffering, and the apparent futility.
Trump articulated an isolationist policy, but (as in so many things) did not consistently implement it. He did oppose Chinese expansion and called for a return of jobs to our homeland. He implemented tariffs to defend our industry. He criticized our NATO partners for not doing their share of the funding but may have thereby strengthened it. His pugnacious, unpredictable temperament gave a demeanor of strength and force that belied his professed isolationism and may have deterred aggressors. He did not pull out of Afghanistan. His Abraham Accords, between Israel and the Arab Sunni gulf states, was a high achievement of diplomacy and a strong move against imperial Iran. Impulsive, incoherent by nature, his instincts internationally were not always crazy and he benefited from a series of sound advisors and a world scene largely at peace.
Biden left Afghanistan in an isolationist impulse. A "people pleaser," without an inner moral or intellectual compass, he read and surrendered to the popular exhaustion with war. Unlike Obama and Trump he ignored his advisors. Betraying our friends who fought with us, abandoning school girls and all with desire for our way of life, surrendering the country into chaos, he gave the green light to our enemies (Russia, China, Jihadism): "America lacks the will to fight; it is effete, decadent, divided, bourgeois, and cowardly; this is NOT the America of FDR, JFK, Ronald Regan or the George Bushes." This departure invited the invasion of the Ukraine. It was, in my view, arguably the most wrong-headed, catastrophic and disgraceful diplomatic decision in American history.
Isolationism is wrong (in my view) on two accounts. First of all, it is unrealistic: our interconnected, technological world has us immersed in a vast international matrix. Internet, terrorism (including cyber, chemical, biological, nuclear), global warming, pandemics, trade, entertainment, refugees, hunger, and military aggression are only a partial list. The idea that we can retreat into our own cave is a fantasy.
As a Catholic, there is a moral issue: indifference, if not suspicion or hostility, to foreigners, to their suffering and well being. This denies the deep Christian roots of our founding and our history, including our participation in the two world wars and our service around the globe for 75 years.
You can see that I am fiercely anti-isolationist. The alternative is internationalism. But there are different types of that.
Liberal Cosmopolitanism
Here we have an optimistic expectation that global peace and prosperity can be achieved through diplomatic cooperation. Hope is placed in international organizations: the United Nations, World Health Organization, European Union, treaties and agreements of all sorts. It is "cosmopolitan" in that it assumes a global unity that trumps narrow, competitive nationalisms. It posits a positive view of mankind as finally rational and virtuous: given education, science and dialogue the nations will arrive at agreements that benefit all.
A capitalist, more rightwing but largely bipartisan version of this expects that global trade, free markets, and economic initiative will benefit all and effect a finance-based system of peace and prosperity. For example, when China opened itself to capital markets a widespread expectation was that economic freedom would eventually bring about liberty in politics, religion, and culture in general. That obviously did not happen.
It is "liberal," in contrast to Marxist and Jihadist universalisms, in that it believes in the superiority of the Western or American way of markets, democracy, rule of law, and freedoms of speech, religion, assembly and such. It trusts that such freedoms release energies and initiatives in economics, politics, science/technology, religion and culture so that this approach will triumph over alternatives as it did over the Nazi, Japanese and Soviet empires. It had its heyday, as noted above, after 1989, with the end of the Cold War when the entire world, including Russia and China, looked hopefully to capitalism.
There is no doubt that only international collaboration can adequately address climate change, international terrorism, pandemics, waves of immigration, and such. Facing these problems, cosmopolitan collaboration is absolutely the correct path ahead. This approach is less satisfactory in dealing with hostile, "bad players" and their malicious ambitions.
While the market-friendly positivism was shared by both political parties well into the new century, the broader diplomatic-military-cultural cosmopolitanism is stronger on the left, specifically the Clintons, Obama and Biden. It blends the boomer anti-Vietnam-war aversion with a contempt for the Bush invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Its darkest hour was Clinton's refusal to intervene in the Rwanda genocide in which 800,000 innocents could have been spared bloody deaths by a few hundred well-equipped marines. That decision may rival or surpass Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan as the most despicable Presidential decision in our history.
Obama was elected on a wave of new hope in a liberal cosmopolitanism that renounced the despised wars "for oil and dominance" of the Bush Neo-Cons. He entered office exuding a confidence that his rationality, liberalism, openness, and rejection of oil-greed, military force and imperial ambitions would smoothly bring a wave of peace to the Middle East. Through no fault of his own, the exact opposite happened. The area exploded with violence and chaos: Libya, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and of course Iran. The liberal conceit that American oil-lust, military arrogance and cultural imperialism caused the turmoil in that area was entirely discredited,. The Obama administration did not cause these convulsions, but it was powerless to stop them. The rage and discontent of the area was basically not USA-made. Obama was enough of a realist and pragmatist that he did exercise some military might, for example using drones in Afghanistan and resisting the impulse to withdraw from there.
Biden has carried on this tradition: besides withdrawal from Afghanistan, we have a slow and weak response to the Russian move on the Ukraine; failure to confront China on human rights, the origin of the Virus, threats against Taiwan, and their imperialistic adventurism; the compulsion to placate rather than confront Iran; and even his choice of diplomatic advisors who exude insecurity, , indecisiveness, and the compulsion to appease. The worst possible posture in a world now wild with vicious predators!
This cooperative approach surely needs to be part of our diplomacy. But as a full strategy, it is even more unrealistic than isolationism: it denies the power of evil in the world. It assumes a Pollyanna world wherein reason, discussion, good will, and kindness prevail to touch the hearts of nationalistic fascists like Putin, totalitarian tyrants like Xi, the Mullahs of Iran and Jihadists of ISIS. In the face of real, forceful evil, it is effete, deferential, passive. It is the soft Neville Chamberlain returning happily from Munich in 1941, carrying a peace accord with Hitler who gained time to prepare for his invasion of Poland.
Neo-Conservatism
(Footnote on the expression "Neo-Conservatism." This is widely used today, on the Right and the Left, in contempt for the advisors around G.W. Bush responsible for the Iraq war. It connotes arrogance, greed, and aggressive hyper-machismo. This disgust with that and the Afghan conflict reflect the emergent isolationism and preference for cosmopolitan cooperation. While not really in that school of thought, the contrarian Paca Fleckinstein does not hesitate to wear it, although in modified form, as a badge of honor.
The term was coined in the 1970s to denote a group of liberals, largely secular NYC Jews, reactive against the extremism of the 1960s left, advocated for a strong, interventionist foreign policy, global capitalism and democracy, tough stance against Communism, and rejection of political radicalism.
Neo-Conservatism stands on two foundations:
First, an enormous pride in the Western, liberal order (freedoms of speech, religion, assembly; democracy; rule of law; free markets) and an ambition to share this with the rest of the world.
Second, a conviction that Evil, powerful-pervasive-aggressive, surging in false ideologies (Fascism, Communism, Jihadism) must be battled forcefully.
This second, a realism about Evil, is what separates it from the shallow optimism of Cosmopolitan Internationalism and the delusional escapism of isolationism.
From Pearl Harbor to the present, this has been the default posture of the USA as the protector of world peace and prosperity. Generally there has been bipartisan consensus in blending Cosmopolitan Cooperation with Neo-Conservative power: the carrot and the stick, the good cop and the bad cop. This has worked to ensure the Pax Americana of the last 75 years. It has now been weakened and is in crisis.
There are several causes for the loss of American confidence and purpose. First, the lingering Vietnam trauma has been inflamed by costly, apparently futile wars in the Middle East. Secondly, American identity and purpose have been undermined from varied, even contradictory directions. From the Left, we have a critique of American imperialism and our own culture as racist, misogynist, hyper-capitalist, LGBTQ-phobic, and arrogant. Also from the Left we have a diminished sense of the Evil we are facing abroad. Also from the Left we have a lessened moral-religious sensibility and a heightened concern, from a narrow secularism, with the environment, health, trade/prosperity and confidence in cosmopolitan collaboration. Meanwhile, from the Right we have a populism suspicious of an America turned secular, amoral, elitist, cosmopolitan, technocratic, materialist and consumerist. We have a divided society, really two incommensurate cultures, fighting each other and ill-equipped for the contest with an Axis of enemies
Ironically, the Russian invasion of the Ukraine has revived a modified Neo-Conservatism as there is broad consensus in our nation and across Europe that we need to unite behind the Ukraine with the kind of resolve we showed in WW II and the Cold War. Defeat of Russia here is essential, not only for the tortured Ukrainians themselves, but to deter other hostile powers from their imperial intentions.
The strength of this approach is its realism about our enemies and resolved to fight for our way of life. The weakness is an arrogance that denies our own failings. At its worst it idolizes "American Exceptionalism" in a false messianism. Condeleza Rice, an elegant Neo-Conservative once said that all people want what we want: freedoms, democracy, markets, rule of law. Mark Steyn, hardcore Canadian conservative corrected her by quoting a Palestinian grandmother whose ambition for her 64 grandchildren was that they die as martyrs, massacring Jews, including school children. My lawyer-solder-son tells me about the impressive municipal building our troops built for an Afghan town: they returned a few months later and found, not court-police-fire-health, but a shelter for goats. Humbled by such failings this approach becomes more sober and prudent.
Conclusion
This essay is fiercely anti-isolationism. It endorses a combination of cooperation in certain areas but forceful deterrence and confrontation in others. Diplomacy and politics are areas of prudential judgment in which we Catholics can and do disagree as we weigh values, probable consequences, dangers and opportunities. What is beyond doubt is that we are at war...culture, economic, diplomatic, military...all the time, everywhere. And we will be until our Lord returns in glory!
Postscript: The Catholic Church's Diplomatic Policy
The Vatican, a sovereign nation, has its own diplomatic policy; takes positions on international issues; participates in the United Nations as a non-member observer. The Pope and Magisterium are infallible on faith and morals, but not on politics and diplomacy. These last are prudential decisions on which Catholics can disagree, including with the Pope. How then does a conscientious Catholic receive a papal statement on a border wall, immigration, global warming, a specific war, tax policy, or the death penalty? Surely with respect, but not with total credulity. There are reasons to trust, and others to question papal policy on diplomacy and politics.
First, on the bright side: The Vatican has a long history of diplomacy and vast experience. It has a presence in almost every part of the world and a broader perspective than any other institution. It is not aligned with any nation, group or ideology and unusually openminded, broad in perspective, and relatively free of such biases. It works from an infallibility in morals and so has the right principles and attitude, although its practical conclusions are not guaranteed.
Second, on the negative side: By its very nature as a vessel of peace, mercy and reconciliation, the Church is uniquely unqualified to deal with Evil in its graphic, concrete reality. For example, its failure to correctly contain the priest sex scandal is partially due to a propensity to mercy and healing and an naivete about deep Evil. Protection of the public good, deterrence of crime, punishment, just retribution, prosecution, just use of force...these are NOT the mission or charism of the hierarchy, priests, bishops and pope. They ARE the work of lay people: soldiers, police, prosecutors, judges. statesmen. A good priest may be the one least prepared to deal with a psychopath. So the hierarchical Church has an inherent blindness, a disinclination to forcefully combat real evil.
In its universality and desire for peace/prosperity it is sympathetic to Cosmopolitan Internationalism in placing high value on trans-governmental organizations like the UN and World Health Organization. It does this prudently and discretely, even as it opposes those agencies in moral issues around unborn human life and sexuality. Aside from those issues, its policy tends to align with those of liberal, Western elites with little sympathy for populist, often right-wing grievance. Understandably, it is suspicious of nationalism but may not always encourage a wholesome patriotism. It is a positive influence for international cooperation but far from infallible on questions of military deterrence and use of force.
An intelligent, conscientious Catholic will listen respectfully to the Vatican on diplomacy and politics, but also to a wide range of sources of information. Its like listening to your Grandfather: hey! He can't be right on everything! 😉By contrast, on faith and morals, the Magisterium elicits total trust.
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